Cazalla Intercultural is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the field of non-formal education and to promote and support volunteering. We work mainly with the Erasmus+ program on the international level and with other local grants such as Caixa Bank’s one. We have an agreement with the City of Lorca and collaborate with it´s Youth Department in running a local Youth Center (Centro de recursos y formación juvenil M13) and giving information about mobility to young people .

Our Objectives:

Contribute to local development and tolerance between cultures and races

Promote human rights education

Promote volunteering as a way of learning

Contribute to improving the quality of youth work

Create international networks with which to collaborate on global projects

Promote mobility as a learning experience among young

To help young people to be active citizens and participate in the European context

Preventing gender violence among young people and contribute to gender equality.

Our points of attention:

The Human Rights

Global challenges

The Interculturality

Citizenship and participation of young people

The prevention of gender based violence among youth

Non-formal education

Creativity and quality in youth work

The active participation of citizens

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About the EVS project

Place: Lorca (Region of Murcia), Spain

Duration: 12 months

Starting date: 7th of January 2018 or 1st of February 2018

Deadline for applications: 10th of December 2017

Videos done by our EVS volunteers:

Blogs in our website: http://cazalla-intercultural.org/blog/

ABOUT THE ACTIVITIES:

YOUTH CENTER ACTIVITIES

Tasks:

The EVS volunteer will be helping in organizing workshops and courses for local community, leisure and educational activities for children and youth, and local projects with the objective of fighting integration difficulties of recently arrived migrants in Lorca.

The volunteer’s task will include coordination of the youth centre: organization of regular workshops for young people, administration of the youth centre in coordination with the youngsters, participation in the local initatives: organization of international days’ celebrations, collaborating with local volunteers, participate in the Language Café (spoken english for youngsters of Lorca) and support during international activities hosted by Cazalla Intercultural.

The volunteer will be encourage to realize his/her own ideas for projects connected with the theme of the project

All volunteers should be also prepared to help us with the maintenance of the Youth Centre (max. 5% of the working hours) and tasks connected to it (cleaning, supporting in cooking, etc.)

The volunteer will receive 2hrs of Spanish classes per week

Volunteer needs to be interested in work with young people, motivation and enthusiasm to cooperate with them. For this place there is a strong preference for a person that likes to organize his/her own job and is able to come up with ideas, priority will be given to those whom have had volunteering experiences before. We do appreciate creative people who might have interesting hobbies to be able to organize workshops with the users of the youth centre. Basic level of Spanish would be very helpful. Many of our users are part of arabic speaking communities, so also some knowledge of Arabic would be supportive (but not mandatory!) for us.

Support the team in the implementation of the local parts of international activities, that will include support of Young people who would like to do their voluntary projects (EVS), implementation of the clases in schools that forms part of the international activities, and other activities working directly with Young people.

Administration support – volunteers might be asked for the translation or the support in the elavoration of the documents, call for participats and other administrative stuff;

Volunteers will spend at least one afternoon per week implementing activities in youth center

The volunteer will be encourage to realize his/her own ideas for projects connected with the theme of the project

All volunteers should be also prepared to help us with the maintenance of the Youth Centre (max. 5% of the working hours) and tasks connected to it (cleaning, supporting in cooking, etc.)

Volunteer will be responsable for the support in the implementation of the communication startegy of the organization, that means will be supporting the activities in the social media, will be preparing the documunication materials like posters, videos etc.

Depending on the volunteers competence the tasks might be adapted to the main área of interest, and there is a possibility to run workshops with Young people on different elements of communication – like photography or social media.

Volunteers will spend at least one afternoon per week implementing activities in youth center

The volunteer will be encourage to realize his/her own ideas for projects connected with the theme of the project

All volunteers should be also prepared to help us with the maintenance of the Youth Centre (max. 5% of the working hours) and tasks connected to it (cleaning, supporting in cooking, etc.)

New GenDeration – learning and action against gender-based violence is a two years long project undertaken by the consortium of 3 European organizations – Cazalla Intercultural from Spain, Pro European Network from Bulgaria and SZANSA from Poland, approved in the framework of the call number REC-RDAP-AWAR-AG-2016 – Action grants to educate and raise the awareness of girls and boys about gender-based violence as a way to prevent it at an early stage.

The overall aim to prevent and counter gender-based violence among children by providing learning and action processes for gender sensitivity

The specific objectives of the projects are:

To provide methodological ground and training opportunities for professionals working with children in the formal and non-formal educational sphere on the topics of gender and gender-based violence;

To engage at least 900 children in learning processes, boosting understanding of gender and gender-based violence, critical thinking on gender and overall gender sensitivity;

To employ child-friendly campaigning methods on awareness raising on gender among children in schools and communities;

To disseminate good practices in preventing and countering gender-based violence among children, generated within the project.

The overall expected results of the project are:

Professionals working with children provided with training opportunities and access to educational resources on the topics of gender and gender-based violence;

Raised awareness among 1500 children on gender and gender-based violence through child-friendly campaign methods;

Generated and disseminated good practices in preventing and countering gender-based violence among children, generated within the project.

The project has two main target groups: children aged 13-18 and professionals directly working with children in the formal and non-formal educational spheres. These target groups then can be divided to sub-target groups depending on the level of their involvement in the project, which also brings different expected results.

The above mentioned objectives and expected results we plan to achieve through:

Gender Matters Manual traslated into Spanish, Polish and Bulgarian

International extended partnership workshop

6 launch events for Gender Matters

3 in-country training for trainers

9 summer camps

75 school workshops

15 school and community campaigns

Love Gen(d)eration App

15 Teens React videos

Posters, postcards and other give-away materials

MOOC on education and awareness raising on gender and gender-based violence

International conference

6 in-country dissemination TCs

Purpose of the external evaluation

The main purpose of the external evaluation will be to support the project consortium to assess the implementation of the project activities from a content – wise perspective over the two years.

It is expected that the evaluator, by being periodically in contact with the Project Coordinator and the Project Management Group, will contribute to the projects continuous evaluation and assessment by raising issues as to its progress and by providing an external perspective on the project contents.

The main purpose of the external evaluation will be to help participants and stakeholders to widen their perspective on the issues dealt with, to improve the projects results and to learn from

the experience of the project.

The external evaluation of the project aims to:

Provide an outside critical view of the project approach and methodology and give suggestions for their improvement during and after the project implementation;

Monitor the effectiveness of the project activities and the quality of the project results during and after the project implementation;

Measure the impact of the project activities on: 1) the project partners’ development; 2) the direct beneficiaries of the project; 3) the indirect beneficiaries of the project.

Responsibilities of the external evaluator

The main responsibilities of the external evaluator of the project will be to:

Prepare an external evaluation plan along with the necessary questionnaires and documents, needed for the plan implementation;

Consult the internal evaluation plan;

Participate in at least 2 international or national events, organized within the project;

Participate in at least 1 coordination partner meeting within the project;

Communicate with project partners, direct and indirect beneficiaries in accordance with the approved external evaluation plan;

Elaborate one evaluation report (at least 15 pages) in November 2018 for the first year of the project, including recommendations to the partners for improvement of performance;

Elaborate one evaluation report (at least 15 pages) in November 2019 for the second year of the project, including overall assessment of the project implementation and impact.

Documents to be submitted

If you are interested to submit your proposal for the external evaluation task, you should submit:

Draft: Technical proposal, including the proposed evaluation methodology (no more than two (2) pages);

Financial proposal, including the proposed fee and breakdown (no more than one (1) page) (the travel and subsistence costs excluded);

CV;

Information on their legal form and ownership structure where applicable;

Confirmation that they are not aware of any conflict of interest that may arise in undertaking the evaluation (template to be sent by request).

Selection criteria

Proposed evaluation plan and methodology

Ability to work with partners to formulate an appropriate robust evaluation framework

Communications skills (both verbal and written) in English, working knowledge of Spanish, Bulgarian or Polish would be an asset

Value for money

Payments and standard contract

Payments shall be made only if the contractor has fulfilled all his or her contractual obligations by the date on which the invoice is submitted.

The payment will be made in three instalments:

A first payment of 20% of the total amount agreed in the contract shall be made 15 days upon submission of the relevant invoice;

A second intermediate payment of 40% of the total agreed amount shall be made in November 2018 – max. 15 days upon submission of the relevant invoice and mid-term report;

The balance payment shall be made no later than the 15th November 2019 upon the receipt of the final invoice and of the completed deliverables.

More detailed information on payments and requirements will be outlined in the contract.

Until I didn’t arrive to Bucharest I wasn’t aware about the difficulty of communicating with people of this unknown country as Romania was supposed to be to me. Despite of the similarity with Spanish language, Romanianlanguage is suppose to be the main barrier when you have to get along with children in hospitals, kindergartens and schools. I have discovered that it’s a really big problem when:

You have to explain in Romanian some activities and games that are really easy to manage in your mother tongue, so you feel really frustrated.

Children try to speak with you, but you are not able to understand anything so you smile and try to answer them with Romanian keywords as “bine”, “Așa și-așa”, “Nu știu ”or “ Foarte frumos”. Sometimes you are right, others you are not and children look at you confused.

You usually work with teenagers and some of them don’t answer in a good way to the activities that you do because you are not able to express neither understand which are their motivations, or things they like and that excite them.

Even these things happen to us with a lot of frequency; little by little we are learning more grammar and vocabulary that is useful to our daily life with the children.

Another obstacle can be the emotional situation of children. Sometimes when you go to the hospitals children are in badly conditions, they are sad or without strength because of their illnesses, so it’s hard to communicate with them, also because you feel the sadness and the pain, but the key is trying to put yourself in children’s shoes and adapt to their moods and trying not to not allow emotions to guide you. It’s true that in these cases it’s more difficult to achieve the goal of making them smiling and happy, but it’s a challenge for you, for working in your creativity, improvisation and ability to solve conflicts.

Working in hospitals allows the opportunity also to deal with young people at the same time that we work with children so we change the way of dealing with them, but sometimes it’s something hard to do because you are used to talk in the same “language” of children.

Despite of these issues we don’t overwhelm and we always try to search the best way to communicate our ideas and thoughts:

Through our non-verbal language- we can communicate and explaining activities and in my opinion is the best and funny way.

We also use an attractive and adapted methodology for them to do more understandable our ideas: fairytales, music, little performances, puppets, handcraft, object theatre, dances, games…

Thinking as a child and acting as a child to understand what they think and what they love.

Putting our energy in what we do, our passion. If you enjoy they will enjoy and more probably that they will understand you.

Humor in communication. The fact of doing and saying stupid things makes them laugh. This has been one of the most important things that I have seen that works better in hospitals.

When we are able to fulfill our ideas through these types of methods the benefits that the children obtain are evident. It’s amazing to understand all the values that we can teach through our games, songs, including teachers of schools. Children became more tolerant people, opened minded and teachers of schools discover new ideas and ways of work related with non-formal education that they can develop in a formal context.

But we also obtain some benefits. For me seeing that some of them are able to learn some things of my culture, songs, simple names of our history or vocabulary is really satisfying. In hospitals only one smile despite of difficulties is something that makes you really happy and that really helps you to believe in your work.

My name is Samira, I have Moroccan nationality but I have been living in Spain since I was 6 years old. I could not get my European Passport yet, that’s why I applied for a Visa to come to Ireland. This process took me 3 months until I arrived to Ireland. Unfortunately, my EVS project was 9 months and not 12 like my colleagues. I feel fortunate because my sending and my host organizations were helping a lot until I got my Visa.

First Impression

When I arrived to Ireland the first thing that captured my attention was that the people was walking in the street in the same direction that the cars, so was so challenging to walk in the street without collide with people! Maybe the big challenge after my Visa application was to understand the Irish accent. I remember perfectly the first month working in PAKT( Parents And Kinds Together) with Elaine, Norma, Brain and the different clubs with the kids and their families.

Challenges

During one month I was feeling exhausted during and after work because my brain was trying to understand what was going on. But after same month, and after all the help from my managers, I started to understand what was happening around me. I feel luck also because Brian trusted in me to do mentoring in the programme One2One (“link young people who are experiencing difficulties in their lives with a trained mentor who will be available both as support and resource to the young person”) even my English was not so good. This experience helped me a lot to discover my creative side.

Although the tasks were so many and sometimes I felt stressed, I need to recognize that I have learned a lot from all the children and all the managers. Is just in the end when you can see how hard was everything because sometimes you take with you all the problems that a lot of kids had in their home. The best feeling ever is when, after every club you see the kids enjoying and having fun, how bit by bit they start to know you, to respect you, and to love you. How they became sad when they know that you are going to leave in several months, and the only single thing that you can bring with you when you finish is all the nice memories.

Evs is a great experience that will change something in your side, and will help you to become stronger, more independent and a more confident version of yourself, in other words, be aware that you will not be the same anymore after this year.

From my own point of view is really hard to found the best project that can make you grow up like a person and also learn or improve the language that you like. In my case, I feel happy and lucky that I could made this EVS with the specific activities that I loved and in English language. All the volunteers we had the opportunity to take classes every Saturday from 10 a.m to 1:20 p.m. It was so important for me to attend to this classes because there they explain you for example that Irish people never, never ever will correct you a sentence in English if it’s wrong because for them is something rude. And of course if you ask them if your sentence is present perfect or past perfect they will not be able to answer you because they don’t study English grammar in the school! So your best option for asking about grammar is English Hour with Vivien and Owen. They are the best teachers ever! They have a lot of experience teaching foreigners students and they are so pragmatic. But also if you want to test your English you have to speak with native people, and if you understand them that means that you are in a good way! Keep going, you are doing it well!

Training and Work

YMCA offer us three trainings during the year with other volunteers which gave us the opportunity to know other volunteers and their projects, and two more trainings in Cork related to PAKT.

In PAKT I used to work from Monday to Thursday (two clubs in Tallagh, one club in Crumlin, one club in Dublin and one club during the summer in Celbridge). On Fridays and when PAKT was closed, I used to work with babies in the creche, youth work and the cafeteria.

In the end I would like to Thank a lot everybody from YMCA for helping me to grow up and teaching me a lot of things, and of course I thank them for this amazing work that they make for the community.

Every Tuesday morning, we have collaboration with the school of saint christobel. Every week we create different workshops for the kids at the ages of 5 years old. In many various topics such as global and maps, Semana santa, Making flower for mother day, and some activities related to important days.

The activities are mostly using paper and coloring pictures then cut and glue to turn the normal paper into 3D art. The coloring and drawing give them the opportunity to express their imagination and idea through art. Before the day of workshop we will discuss about the main idea or topic that would be nice for them in order to understand and having fun at the same time.

One topic was about recycle day and the stuff we have around the house that able to be recycling. The activity we find interesting is the parachute that made from plastic bag. Parachute is one of the activity we did which is very fun but in order to know how hard it is to made, we need to try it out first. Start by using plastic bag, rope and clay which turn out not as hard as we thought it would be. After combine everything together then you can throw the parachute in the air and see them fly.

They are always active, answer with enthusiasm and always ready to do every activity we prepared for them. Mostly we start of by asking question relate to the topic which can help us get the idea of their understanding and also give them some example before get into the topic. After talking we will show the easy presentation for clearer picture of the topic then it will do the activity.

In this week we did the workshop about animal in savanna. Start by asking the questions so they could express their ideas after that we give an easy presentation about the savanna then let them choose the animal that they want to do.

From my experience as a non-Spanish speaker, it’s even harder to understand the children but in the other hands I try to communicate by using hands and the stuffs around. Of course sometime they understand and sometime (most of the time) they don’t. I was nervous the first time I standing in front of the class but when I saw the kids and they are so nice and the clear look in their eyes give me the ease feeling. After couple weeks, I’m more relax with them and try to say what I understand and hope they’ll understand me as well.